Dish (8 page)

Indeed, gore magazines were the demented cousins of the
publishing industry. Pope’s outrageous formula for the
National Enquirer
worked wonders for circulation, though it didn’t help him much in the prestige department. The
National Enquirer,
Gene Pope quickly learned, wasn’t going to open doors for him the way
Il Progresso
did for his father. Quite the opposite. Pope’s children were once asked to leave the Catholic school they attended when the mother superior discovered what their father did for a living.
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New York City administrators were worried that the
National Enquirer
and magazines like it were taking over the newsstands and tainting the minds of the young. The tabloid was banned in some areas and Pope was forced to resign his position on the Board of Higher Education because of the
Enquirer.
Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy refused to give Pope’s staff the police press cards they needed. Pope sued Kennedy in New York Supreme Court, charging him with “restricting freedom of the press.” He didn’t win the case.

To stay ahead of the competition, Pope, who actually grew faint at the sight of blood, kept upping the gore quotient on the cover of his paper because the gorier it was, the better the sales. But he also continued to tinker with the mixture, and by the late 1950s, included other ingredients in his formula. One was heartwarming stories about common folks that made readers feel good about themselves. Pope also rediscovered celebrities. After
Confidential
folded, there was a void for stories about celebrities. Scantily clad women had long been featured in the
Enquirer,
but by the late 1950s, they were mostly starlets like Angie Dickinson and Gina Lollobrigida. “Wolf Whistles Are Music to Any Girl’s Ear,” Angie Dickinson supposedly told the tabloid for a July 5, 1959, cover story. “The ultimate purpose of a girl is to make a man feel like a man—all over,” Dickinson, said, adding that she “can’t understand why girls get angry when they’re referred to as a ‘broad.’ … Long as they talk about girls, what’s the difference?”

That issue’s hodgepodge content revealed the paper’s transition from a hard-boiled men’s tabloid to a celebrity gossip sheet targeted at middle America: It included a ‘Who’s Sexier’ competition, based on an alleged feud between Jayne Mansfield and future
Gilligan
star Tina Louise; a series of photographs of a toddler getting his first hair cut; a racing column; a photograph of a blood-soaked woman crumbled on the floor of her mobile home after a game of dominoes turned ugly; a political column updating readers on Richard Nixon and Jimmy Hoffa; gossip columns telling about Cary Grant and Gina Lollobrigida holding hands and Fernando Lamas showing up nude at a party; a boxing column; and news of Liz Taylor’s outrage over a bootlegged film of her wedding to Eddie Fisher.

The mixture, however odd, was working. In 1958, the
National Enquirer
was in the black and by 1959, it was turning a solid profit. Generoso Pope Jr. was well on his way to creating a publishing empire that would rival his father’s—but would turn him into a pariah in New York’s social and political circles.

By then, Gene Pope’s eldest brother, Fortune, had emerged as a respectable and powerful figure in New York. He had inherited his father’s position—the one Gene had expected to—and was running the family business and overseeing the Columbus Day Parade. Fortune had brought Colonial public and was, according to press accounts of the time, both “fabulously wealthy” and “incredibly powerful.” “Fortune Pope is regarded by many in this country—and by nearly everyone in Italy—as the spokesman for the Italian-American community,” the
New York Times
wrote in 1960. “If you want to import Italian lace, or sell machinery to Italy, or just would like to have an appointment with the President of Italy while you’re there on a visit, Fortune Pope is the first person you go to see.”

Meanwhile, the authorities were closing in on Gene Pope. Censors were trying to shut down the
Enquirer.
He was being investigated by the FBI. Pope’s mother blamed it on his continued association with members of the mob, especially Pope Sr.’s old friend, Frank Costello. “Some company you keep,” Catherine Pope told Gene when she heard that he had dined with Costello
the night the mobster was shot. “The sins of the father will be visited upon the children,” she warned her youngest son, “and your father has sinned so, therefore, you keep this up, and you’ll ruin your life as well as he did.”

Catherine Pope’s prediction was directed to the wrong son. In July 1960, Fortune and Anthony Pope were indicted by a special grand jury. The twelve-count charge against them included allegations of corporate theft and fraud. The two brothers were accused of taking more than $375,000 from the publicly held Colonial Sand and Stone and diverting the money to their privately held companies. They were also charged with billing the city for $176,599 worth of rock salt that they never delivered. The two brothers initially denied the charges, but eventually pleaded guilty to five of the counts against them, and no contest to five more counts. They were fined $500,000 and began a slow fade from their prestigious public life.

Generoso Pope Sr.’s dream of a political dynasty ruled by his sons foundered, just as Gene Pope Jr.’s publishing empire was taking off. The timing was not coincidental. The charges against Fortune and Anthony were gathered by Costello’s ally, Judge Sammy DeFalco. The source of much of the information used in the indictment, according to several members of the family, was Gene Pope. “He was bitter about being edged out of the family business,” said his son Paul.

By 1966, Pope started phasing the gore out of the
Enquirer.
“I didn’t want to be with that crowd,” he said. “I wanted to put out a paper a woman, say, at the supermarket, would pick up and take home, expecting to find something in it that would mean something—that would be of some practical or educational value to her in this life of decency most of us are trying to live.” The real reason Pope cleaned up his act was that the market for gore was leveling off. Circulation hit 1 million and would go no further. “There are only so many libertines and neurotics,” Pope observed.

Another reason for the
Enquirer’s
flat sales was that there was, at the time, a radical drop in the number of newsstands, which had been run out of business by newspaper strikes that had shut
down publications across the country. With so many newsstands closing down, Pope looked for a new sales rack and found it in the nation’s 50,000 supermarkets. Pope had to find a new place to peddle his ware; he was impressed with
Reader’s Digest’s
circulation of 17.9 million. One of its primary outlets was grocery stores, but there was no way that supermarkets would carry the
National Enquirer’s
mix of cheesecake and gore. Pope began to think about repositioning the paper yet again, this time focusing on celebrity gossip, real-life heroics, and self-help and medical stories. “I decided to clean up the
Enquirer
and turn it into a condensed version of
Reader’s Digest,”
Pope said in 1969.

Around this time, Pope ran into his good friend Frank Costello. “Stay away from me,” the once powerful mobster cautioned him. “You must stay away now. Don’t be seen with me. You’ll get hurt. Stay away. Don’t come near me anymore. It won’t be good for you, my son.” The incident spooked Pope. Shortly afterward, he moved from New York City to Englewood, Cliffs, New Jersey. But he didn’t feel safe there either.

In 1969, Pope was badly shaken by another event. The young publisher identified with Rupert Murdoch who, like him, was the son of a media magnate and was drawing the contempt of the media elite. That year, Murdoch and his wife went home to Australia for Christmas and left their Rolls Royce back in London for their executives to use. One day, the wife of one of Murdoch’s executives was kidnapped while she was driving the car. The kidnappers thought that she was Murdoch’s wife, Anna, and when they realized their mistake, killed the woman and fed her body to some pigs.

The following year, another incident occurred that would forever close the door for Pope on New York and the world in which he had grown up. The delivery trucks that distributed the
Enquirer
were distributing fewer papers than he was sending out. Pope suspected that someone—possibly the Teamsters—was trying to cheat him. He called on an old contact named Angie La Pastornia, who had recently been released from prison. Angie agreed to ride on one of the trucks that Pope suspected was stealing from him. The next day, when the truck came back, Angie was inside, dead.
A note attached to the knife that was stuck in his chest read simply, “Don’t fuck with us.”

Pope packed up his house and his office and told his family and staff to meet him at the train station, where he handed out tickets and boarded a train for Florida. Pope had a printing press in Pompano Beach, and he was moving his entire operation to nearby Lantana. Shortly after he arrived, he got his friend Roy Cohn to set up a meeting with Richard Nixon. On the promise of favorable press from the
Enquirer,
Nixon invited the heads of fourteen supermarket chains to the White House and talked them into selling the now cleaned up
National Enquirer
at their checkout stands. Pope would no longer be dependent on newsstand sales, which meant he would not be beholden to the Teamsters.

“It’s politics,” Pope later said of his deal with Nixon. “One hand washes the other.” Pope would rule over the area around Lantana, Florida, population 8,000, and it would become known as Tabloid Valley, a place where a certain type of journalism was allowed to take root, to grow and flourish.

“How can I take this kid seriously?” Walter Winchell said when John F. Kennedy was running for President. “He spends half his time screwing every girl that comes around. I’ve seen lots of nothings like him around the Stork Club and other places where the sons of rich men go and waste their time and money.” By then, Winchell’s power was declining, but he was still the most powerful gossip columnist in the country, and he thought that if John F. Kennedy really wanted power, he would eventually have to bow to him. Winchell had reason to believe that he had some power over Kennedy. Although Winchell was past his peak, he had the dirt on the young politician. Joseph Kennedy had once hired Winchell to get the goods on a woman John Kennedy was dating. One of Winchell’s all-time best sources, J. Edgar Hoover, regularly gave Winchell files on Kennedy. So did Bobby Kennedy’s nemesis, Roy Cohn, who was another big source for Winchell.

But during the election, Winchell was quite evenhanded and invited Kennedy to appear on his foundering television talk show. When Kennedy, who could nurse a grudge and who was also aware of Winchell’s ratings, turned him down and instead went
on Jack Paar’s
Tonight Show,
Winchell was furious. He saw it as a snub, which it was—a very portentous snub. It foretold the decline of gossip columnists and the rise of celebrity-friendly TV talk shows. After Kennedy was elected,
Confidential,
which since the 1957 libel trial had ironically taken to attacking gossip writers, chortled about the slight. “President Kennedy has no time to waste on gossip columnists,” the former scandal magazine declared. “As soon as he took office, the White House welcome mat was withdrawn as far as WW was concerned. And Walter, longing to share the confidences of the great and powerful, was out in the cold.”

Winchell began to attack the President in his column. Some attacks were legitimate, such as the stories he reported linking Kennedy to organized crime, but most were hysterical, personalized attacks, accusing Kennedy of being soft on Communism and calling the White House the “Pink House” or the “oddministration.” Irritated, Attorney General Robert Kennedy met with Hearst executive Richard Berlin and put pressure on him to delete anti-Kennedy comments from Winchell’s column. When the gossip columnist found out about the meeting, he went on a tear. “I say the Administration’s attempt to transform the American press into a propaganda weapon is as iniquitous as it is perilous,” Winchell wrote.

The aging gossip columnist didn’t stand a chance against the charismatic young president. Winchell lost his television show, and by the early 1960s, his column, which was once syndicated in 2,000 papers, was now printed by only 150. Within a few years, the man who had been the most powerful gossip columnist in history was taking out ads, begging some publication to print his column. “Never claimed being a newspaperman, Mr. Editor. Always called myself a newsboy,” he said in a 1967 ad in
Variety.
“Peddling papers. Why not audition the column for one month?” There were no takers.